I have been interested in social, mobile, and cloud for several years, but only in the last year or two have I noticed that these areas have become closely intertwined. It’s as if they were destined to work together in a new paradigm. I almost can’t think of one without the other two. Mobile lets me be more social. Social led me to cloud. Cloud just is.

The Intersection of Cloud, Mobile and Social— Increasingly organizations are looking to tap the collective power of social, mobile and cloud technologies. We asked Ric Telford, IBM VP of Cloud Services, to share his perspective on the trend in light of IBM’s new social business software including SmartCloud Docs, a cloud-based office productivity suite. University of Texas at El Paso is using the software to collaborate in the cloud using mobile devices. Cloud Computing Journal: What’s the connection between Social, Mobile and Cloud. Are they just three tech buzzwords? Ric Telford: Social, mobile and cloud are inextricably linked as three facets of the same movement – a new era of computing. Some call it the “third platform,” others “SoMoClo, let’s just call it “new era” for now. Cloud is the delivery, mobile is the ubiquitous access and social is the personal engagement. Cloud is scalable, flexible IT resources on-demand with the compute power to handle real-time analytics and Big Data; mobile is having simplified, user-friendly access anywhere. Social adds the power of collaboration. As one consolidated framework, this “new era” enables flexible delivery of services and expanding reach – bringing communication and productivity to whole new levels.

A coworker just told me that she knew nothing about cloud and wanted recommendations on where to start. Here is my very short list of links, for those who are otherwise tech savvy, just not about cloud:

[This article was submitted for future publication on ThoughtsOnCloud.com]

Remember the skepticism around onlineshopping and e-commerce sites back in the day when the web was young?Everyone was afraid of giving out their credit card information overthe Internet, for fear it would be intercepted. We eventually gotover that fear, thanks to encryption technologies such as SecureSockets Layer (SSL), which make e-commerce much safer today. Thatsame technology also plays a role in cloud security, and that is onething to consider, along with other security issues when moving yourapplication to the cloud.

Publiccloud versus on-premises

You basically have the same securityissues and considerations for deploying applications on the cloud asyou do for running them on premises. The difference is that on cloud,some of those issues are handled by your cloud service provider. Theimportant thing to consider is how far the cloud service provider’sresponsibilities extend, and where your responsibilities as theclient, or virtual machine (VM) instance owner, take over.

Root access for customers to guest virtual machines, allowing further hardening of VMs

No sharing of private images between accounts on the cloud

Access to the portal and APIs, which requires a user ID and password

Users must comply with IBM’s stringentsecurity policies, and are subject to regular security scans.

Not all cloud providers offer the samekind of protection, so do your homework!

Image— or instance — is everything

As a VM instance owner on the IBMSmartCloud, you have root access and control over that instance as ifit were one of your own on premises, and you are responsible forsecurity on the instance itself. That means that it is up to you toconfigure access to that resource, install and run anti-virussoftware on it, and so on. Treat it like any other client in yourenterprise; it is just as vulnerable to threats and attack. This blogpost lists several useful links to articles about securing andmanaging your instances.

Getstarted with the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise: This articledescribes how to securely connect to, configure the firewall of, andmanage (encryption) keys for your instances. You should take care ofthese tasks immediately upon creating your instances. Determine whowill need access to your instances, determine the firewall ports thatneed to be open or closed, and be prepared to use and manage keys foraccess.

Why key managementis important

IBM SmartCloud employs encryption soyou can control access to your applications and data in the cloud.However, encryption alone does not guarantee security. Keys must alsobe stored and managed properly.

IBMSmartCloud Enterprise tip: Integrate your authentication policy usinga proxy: Describes how to create a proxy bridge between yourhomegrown applications and the IBM SmartCloud. This bridge can allowyou to implement finer-grained access control that cannot be directlyimplemented in the IBM SmartCloud portal. In other words, you can usethis technique to control not only who can access, but how, where, orwhen they can access data.

Cloudsecurity considerations: This good general article is abouthigh-level cloud security concepts. This is just the tip of theiceberg, but it does give a very concise overview.

Extra credit

Model-drivencloud security:This article discusses the challenges of cloud application securitypolicy automation and describes how it can be achieved through amodel-driven security architecture and deployment.